I don’t believe in shaming women for their natural figures at all, but for the love of God, why did Elle Magazine do this to poor Taylor Swift? She’s a tall, lanky girl and this jumpsuit – with vertical stripes!!! – is just ten kinds of wrong on her. It does terrible things to her figure. The rest of the editorial is like this too – like Swifty is trying to exploit some of the worst parts of ‘70s fashion. You can see Elle’s cover package here. In the interview, Swifty is mostly talking about music and boys and predictably, she’s pretty full of it at times. Some highlights:

A not-so-veiled reference to Harry Styles: “Shake It Off” and “Clean” were the last two things we wrote for the record, so it shows you where I ended up mentally. “Clean” I wrote as I was walking out of Liberty in London. Someone I used to date—it hit me that I’d been in the same city as him for two weeks and I hadn’t thought about it. When it did hit me, it was like, Oh, I hope he’s doing well. And nothing else. And you know how it is when you’re going through heartbreak. A heartbroken person is unlike any other person. Their time moves at a completely different pace than ours. It’s this mental, physical, emotional ache and feeling so conflicted. Nothing distracts you from it. Then time passes, and the more you live your life and create new habits, you get used to not having a text message every morning saying, “Hello, beautiful. Good morning.” You get used to not calling someone at night to tell them how your day was. You replace these old habits with new habits, like texting your friends in a group chat all day and planning fun dinner parties and going out on adventures with your girlfriends, and then all of a sudden one day you’re in London and you realize you’ve been in the same place as your ex for two weeks and you’re fine. And you hope he’s fine. The first thought that came to my mind was, I’m finally clean. I’d been in this media hailstorm of people having a very misconstrued perception of who I was. There were really insensitive jokes being made at awards shows by hosts; there were snarky headlines in the press—”Taylor Goes Through a Breakup: Well, That Was Swift!”—focusing on all the wrong things.

Writing songs about love: “I’d never been in a relationship when I wrote my first couple of albums, so these were all projections of what I thought they might be like. They were based on movies and books and songs and literature that tell us that a relationship is the most magical thing that can ever happen to you. And then once I fell in love, or thought I was in love, and then experienced disappointment or it just not working out a few times, I realized there’s this idea of happily ever after which in real life doesn’t happen. There’s no riding off into the sunset, because the camera always keeps rolling in real life. It’s magical if you ask anyone who has ever fallen in love—it’s the greatest. Now I have more of a grasp on the fact that when you’re in a state of infatuation and you think everything that person does is perfect, it then—if you’re lucky—morphs into a real relationship when you see that that person is not in fact perfect, but you still want to see them every day.”

She’s not going to rebel against her image: “As far as the need to rebel against the idea of you, or the image of you: Like, I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this. And so I’m not going to sit there and say, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t had corkscrew-curly hair and worn cowboy boots and sundresses to awards shows when I was 17; I wish I hadn’t gone through that fairy-tale phase where I just wanted to wear princess dresses to awards shows every single time.” Because I made those choices. I did that. It was part of me growing up. It wasn’t some committee going, “You know what Taylor needs to be this year?” And so with 1989, I feel like we gave the entire metaphorical house I built a complete renovation and it made me love the house even more—but still keeping the foundation of what I’ve always been.

[From Elle]

I actually like what she says about not being made by a committee, so there’s nothing to really “rebel” against. It’s true, she was never a Disney girl and she wasn’t stage-managed into oblivion by overzealous parents. Her transition from girl to woman has been messy at times, but it’s been her own journey. Which is why I wish she would stop complaining about the “really insensitive jokes” made at her expense. She owns so much of her life, good and bad. Why is she incapable of laughing at herself? Why can’t she acknowledge that parts of her life were and are messy and complicated and funny? I mean, she’s mad hundreds of millions of dollars writing blind –item burn songs. It IS funny. And she should be happy to get the last laugh.

Photos courtesy of Michael Thompson for ELLE.